Social Network Sites

I read the article titled "Critical Persepectives on Social Network sites" by Alla Zollers and she mentions Web 2.0 at the beggining of her article. Web 2.0 sounds like some new sort of software product but it actually is not. It is actually a revolution which Grossman points out. Web 2.0 includes myspace, facebook, and youtube and to you and I these are the norm...but it wasn't always this way. These new age sites require us to participate and for that very reason i have the most outdated info on my sites.

Myspace and acebook have their own claims. Myspace calls itself "a place for friends" and facebook calls itself "a social utility that connects you with the people around you" I believe they are both correct. In my experience this is exactly my purpose for them. I use Myspace for keeping in touch with life long friends who I most likely went to grade school with and I can always refer back to them on that site. When I think of my use of facebook it usually involves people around me at that time in my life.

example:

Spring semester of my sophmore year of college I chose to do an internship with Disney and while I was down there my facebook was thriving. My facebook constantly had new friends being added and it just became full of people that I didn't really know yet, but they were people i could not aviod..There was no getting away from these people. Now I rarely recieve anything from those same people who had my facebook working overtime. My myspace has always been there. I actually never created it, a girl created one for me and I just took it over. No matter where I am in the world I can reach my closest friends through myspace. Also another big deal I believe is that facebook began as a college site...none of my immediate friends from home went to college so they never really got interested in facebook.

Now a days I come off as werid to many people because I am not so dependent on technology as some of my friends. I do honeslty notice a difference in how people interact and I tend to break the mold. Now a days when I am walking I seem to be followed by an imaginary friend because people always look up...see me.. and then immediatley focus on something just past me and that is only the brave. The other peolple I see are the ones that immediatley refer to their cell phone as a safety blanket that will protect them from my gaze or even they look to their ipods (mp3 players) maybe to change their song to one more fitting for my imaginary friend.

My 21st birthday just recently passed on April 30th and I have never recieved less Happy Birthday wishes in my life on Social networks...It honestly bothered me... until I began to read the messages... people were apologizing to me that they couldn't find my wall to post and for that reason some people didn't even bother to leave me a message..haha.. I was amazed. Zollers makes a point of saying that people are most likely to post on your wall. I wonder what this means. I make sense of it by imagining facebook is another world and the tabs and buttons are like public transportation that take you to people houses where they can drop by, but can't get in because they cannot find the door (wall) and they are not willing to go around back (leave a message) to see if you are working in the yard... haha it is a little selfish but now they are pissed off because they just had to pay the bus fair (time) to find you are not around so they decide to call a cab and get out of there quick(on to another house).

Quick funny story... people who I have accepted as friends and decide to stalk me always get the wrong impression... as far as they can tell I only hang out with white people when the reality is that my white friends are the only ones with digital cameras therefore a majority of my photos are with them...